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The issue of social media accountability and anonymity continues front and centre. I was listening to the BBC’s popular radio show “ Any Questions ” recently when the panel was asked about the very serious topic of threats and abuse on social media that appears to be forcing some people out of politics and preventing worthy candidates from entering the public sphere. A couple of the panelists said that online anonymity needs to end. You can see their point. But requiring people to disclose their personally-identifiable information to unaccountable social media platforms is not the solution. It is , frankly, none of Twitter’s business who I actually am. This sounds like a immovable object meeting an irresistible force, but it really isn’t. There is away through this, and it comes from understand how digital identity works (or, at least, should work). What we want is a system where people can have free speech (putting to one side what this really means for a moment) but where they canno...

xxx On Friday (Oct. 18), the bank Credit Suisse said it was going to tack on a negative 0.75 percent interest rate for customers who have more than $2 million in the bank. For example, if a customer has a balance of $3 million for a year, that customer would get charged $7,600. If a balance is above $10.1 million, the fee goes up to 0.85 percent. This starts for corporate bank members on Nov. 15 and for individual customers on Jan. 1 of next year. Low Interest Rates Force Swiss Banks To Charge | PYMNTS.com : xxx

xxx “The future in five years, if we don’t have a good answer, is basically China re-wiring [the rest of the world] with a digital renminbi running on their controlled blockchain,” Marcus said. This could mean the potential for “a whole part of the world completely blocked from U.S. sanctions and protected from U.S. sanctions and having a new digital reserve currency.” Marcus: China Wins If Facebook's Libra Fails | PYMNTS.com : xxx

xxx There is an opportunity for digital currencies to support a transition away from the destabilising effects of US dollar dominance, Bank of England governor Mark Carney says. In remarks on October 18, Carney called on policy-makers to consider whether they should be waiting for China’s renminbi to become a new reserve currency – “which doesn’t solve the problem” – or take matters into their own hands with the creation of a hegemonic digital currency. ‘Hegemonic digital currency’ could help fix global system – Carney - Central Banking : xxx

xxx The Islamic State also demands a cut of the revenues earned by small businesses. “We either pay in olive oil or cash, it depends on the production,” Predatory Islamic State Wrings Money From Those It Rules - The New York Times : xxx

xxx Levchin said he first got comfortable with the regulations in the financial sector when he worked at PayPal. At Affirm, he has embraced them because they tend to discourage would-be rivals in the tech industry who don’t want to deal with the hassles of operating in a highly regulated industry, he said. “I’m a big fan of regulation, actually,” Levchin said. “If you’re smart about it, it becomes a competitive advantage.” Affirm’s Levchin Opposes Tech Breakup — The Information : xxx

xxx "‘Assuming uptake is strong – and BPAY is a long game player – the new functionality is set to take a bite out of the credit card and direct debit segments of the payment industry that are ripe for disruption, especially on the domestic payments front" From "BPAY Reveals API Push into Core Enterprise Software | PaymentsJournal" . xxx

xxx “Central banks [are] chipping away at the dollar’s ‘exorbitant privilege’,” said Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at Deutsche Bank in New York. Why central banks are edging away from the dollar | Financial Times : Now, economists are not the only people who are concerned about the dollar’s dominance and the consequent extension of American soft power. There are many other groups who think that it is time end the fiat dollar and it’s hegemonic power. Some people, such as Rand Paul and ISIS, think that it might be time to return to a new form of gold standard. xxx The problem for ISIS was that all that trade was executed in U.S. dollars. So in spite of the group’s declared war on U.S. hegemony, its economy was actually facilitating U.S. dollar dominance. Sharia Goldbugs: How ISIS Created a Currency for World Domination - CoinDesk :   xxx xxx "So why the clamor for its return? Nostalgia, said economist Charles Wyplosz. ‘People long for a simpler age,’ wh...

xxx Alex Benay is the chief client officer at MindBridge Ai in Ottawa and served as the chief information officer of Canada from 2017-19. Opinion: Canada needs to assert its digital identity - The Globe and Mail : xxx

xxx The question therefore should be: If our national economic backbone is one based on industrial-aged concepts, what is a digital economic backbone? Simply put, it is a citizen’s trusted digital identity. Opinion: Canada needs to assert its digital identity - The Globe and Mail : xxx

xxx The problem for ISIS was that all that trade was executed in U.S. dollars. So in spite of the group’s declared war on U.S. hegemony, its economy was actually facilitating U.S. dollar dominance. Sharia Goldbugs: How ISIS Created a Currency for World Domination - CoinDesk : xxx

xxx The view that the giant big tech firms could disrupt the banking system, and that regulators should watch out, is gaining ground. Yet the experiences of China (which has, in many ways, become the leader) suggest that this concern is exaggerated. The main reason is that big tech firms already have market power to buy financial services on good terms from a sector that has excess capacity and faces strong regulatory pressure. Big tech: a threat to banks? - Central Banking : xxx

xxx Alessandro Baroni, CMO equensWorldline, speaks about the technological issues regarding online identity, the role of the financial services industry in determining the future of online identity and how identity should be considered a ‘big business’ concept for financial institutions. Identity is bigger than payments : xxx

xxx "At the time, ISIS was sitting on 34,000 square miles of oil-rich territory. By trading oil using its own currency, the dinar, ISIS planned to destabilize the U.S. economy by forcibly decoupling the dollar from the oil business (the petro-dollar system, which ISIS refers to as America’s ‘Achilles heel’)." From "Sharia Goldbugs: How ISIS Created a Currency for World Domination - CoinDesk" . xxx

In my keynote speech at KnowID 2019 in Las Vegas, I said that we needed think about the big picture around digital identity. I said that digital identity should be seen as a fundamental defence in the cyberwar that we are already in and that has no imaginable end. It’s possible that some of the people in the audience felt that I was being hyperbolic and that this piece of conference rhetoric was for entertainment purposes only. In which case I must refer them to the recent comments of General Sir Nick Carter, Britain's Chief of the Defence Staff, who said that our nation is “ at war every day ” due to constant cyberattacks. Even more interestingly, he then went on to say in the modern world there is no longer a distinction between war and peace (my emphasis). This is precisely as the great media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted. Indeed, I quoted him in my speech. In  Culture is our Business , written nearly 50 years ago, he said that “World War III is a guerrilla information w...

xxx There is no good way for a person to identify another person without first mutually agreeing on Brand identities. crawshaw - 2019-09-29 : xxx